Enterprise Blockchain Company R3 Launches Confidential Computing Platform ‘Conclave’

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Global enterprise software firm R3 has launched Conclave, a confidential computing platform that secures sensitive business data while it’s being used.

Conclave allows firms to securely aggregate their datasets to solve shared business problems for their customers and across markets, without revealing the actual data to anyone. It paves the way for a new generation of trusted services that can detect fraud, reduce cost, build high-value multi-party analytics and more—where the owners of the data control how it is processed.

Conclave solves critical business challenges where data needs to be shared, but without any one person or firm seeing another’s information. For example, a bank that operates an electronic market, but wants to assure its customers that it does not see their data; or an insurer that needs to share information about fraudulent claims without breaching confidentiality rules. Traditionally, data is only encrypted at rest and in transit, but Conclave also protects it while it is being processed.

The Conclave platform, which harnesses the combined power of confidential computing with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), was built to be developer and business friendly. It has a high-level, intuitive API allowing users to easily write applications on any operating system, as well as code in their language of choice.

Conclave is currently available as a stand-alone platform and is compatible with R3’s flagship blockchain platform Corda Enterprise. A full integration between Corda Enterprise and Conclave is forthcoming.

David E. Rutter, CEO at R3, said: “Proprietary data—if shared and pooled effectively—holds the key to greater analytics, insight, and commercial opportunity. Yet, many firms resist sending it because of an inherent mistrust in how it will be used. R3’s Conclave is uniquely designed to solve this problem of trust through the promise of technologies such as confidential computing and Intel SGX. Conclave offers best-in-class technology, backed by the rich experience of our developers and business team, to empower customers to bring about a new era of privacy in data sharing, processing and analysis.”

Ralf Helkenberg, Research Manager, European Privacy and Data Security at IDC said: “Businesses today are walking a tightrope between data protection regulation and achieving data-driven business outcomes. Leveraging Intel’s hardware-based Confidential Computing technology, R3’s privacy-centric Conclave platform enables business to accelerate collaboration and innovation with sensitive data in a secure, trustworthy and compliant manner.”

Chaim Finizola, ClaimShare Director at IntellectEU, said: “As blockchain application builders, some of the main challenges we face are related to the ability to detect the uniqueness of users and data in a network without revealing or sharing any sensitive information. With the launch of our insurance platform, ClaimShare, Conclave has proven to be the missing piece in the puzzle. It enables us to prevent duplicate fraud claims by matching private data of suspicious claims between insurers. With Conclave, we are one step closer to fighting fraud in real-time.”

“Intel SGX can help improve the privacy and integrity of data and algorithms in multiparty systems,” said Anand Pashupathy, General Manager of Security System Software at Intel. “The developer friendly capabilities delivered in R3’s Conclave can help expand the use of Intel SGX for enterprise applications.”

Dr. Pandurang Kamat, CTO at Persistent Systems, said: “Our confidential inference platform uses Conclave to give businesses cryptographically assured security and privacy over customer data. This is invaluable for any organization which handles personally identifiable data, especially when moving workloads to the cloud. Conclave’s developer-friendly build has allowed us to load pre-trained machine learning models directly into the secure enclave for inferencing. This allows data scientists to focus on building models and let our platform run them confidentially. Conclave is secure, adaptable and flexible – a great choice for any business looking to harness the promise of confidential computing.”

About R3

R3 is an enterprise software firm that is pioneering digital industry transformation. With foundation in enterprise blockchain technology, they provide solutions that deliver trust across the financial services industry and beyond.

R3’s enterprise blockchain platform Corda is digitalizing the processes and systems that firms rely on to connect and transact with each other and has more than 350 institutions deploying, servicing and building on it. The Conclave platform harnesses the promise of confidential computing and Intel® SGX technologies. Conclave empowers businesses to develop applications that analyze and process sensitive data from multiple parties—all without compromising on confidentiality.

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